The latest. Well this Star Destroyer has been taking a lot of time but I have been keeping up with the star Trek movie equally. I’m about to finish the Star Destroyer and move on to the Nautilus and less time consuming project and another 66 inch Enterprise kit to get out to a customer. So in a couple of more weeks I’ll be able to spend full time on the movie and developing our Star Trek sip off series, “Star Trek Sirius.”

The VFX crew is hard at work on the effects for the film and with any luck in a few more weeks the first trailer will be made.

Well it’s been a busy first week of the year. Lots of work done on the Star Destroyer. Got all the fiber optics finally. A 1000 ft and so many holes my eyes have gone cross. I’ll be hooking up the actual lighting tomorrow. I’ll be doing another video report the end of this week.

On the film I’m sorry to say that we lost our camera rig that would have helped us get some nice dolly shots of the big model. I guess it wasn’t in the stars. Paul Gentry and I both agreed without proper conditions to shoot the model it would lend itself well or match to the CGI we are doing. So it was scrubbed to a later date on the next TOS 1 hour movie called “Star Trek Sirius” more on that later. It’s a drag because the whole idea behind doing this short movie was to shoot the model I spent 47 videos making. But in “Sirius” she will live in space!

Moving on I’m getting comps of the live action on the bridge done on a daily basis. Here is a frame grab from one of the most recent. We have many different angels and close ups in the film and I’ll post some frame grabs as we go along.

Shortly as soon as I get a few effects shots I will cut a teaser trailer to get you all going.

It occurred to me I never posted pictures of our actor Justin Heard, a life long friend and fine actor.

These were taken the day of your live action shoot. You never get to see the ears this well in the film as he straight on in many of the shots. Fortunately Modelman Tom was shooting from another angle and is doing roto work on the footage so we can use it.

It took awhile to edit the time line and pull the footage I would use. But once that was done I could render off the live action to targa frames so I could composite them with the CGI backgrounds. This took a bit of testing and figuring but once done it’s smooth sailing from here.

This is one cut from the beginning of the film. It has full sound and sound effects. Now all I have to do is repeat this step about 50 more times with different angles, cuts, and scenes.

Don’t blink it goes by fast but the actual film itself will be around 17 minutes long.

Another News report will follow in a couple of hours that detail how I got to this. It might seem simple enough but it isn’t.

In addition I have been putting in 100s of feet of fiber optics in the Star Destroyer while things render. Needless to say my days are wonderfully full! I should finish her in a weeks time and then I’m on to the Nautilus~